Most significant reasons that led us to (La)TeX

Question

Looking back, what really convinced you to begin writing with TeX or LaTeX?

This question is "community wiki", so there's no reputation to lose or to gain.

Please don't write advantages of TeX and LaTeX or any pros and cons.

I hope to read about something like

• a drastic experience that led you to TeX,
• a beautiful book, paper or poster that changed your view dramatically,
• a first big success with a (La)TeX creation,
• a person who inspired you.

Anything in this spirit would be great. Please post just a single reason or event in each answer. If you further shared a similar experience that you read here, voting that up would be fine.

Answer 1

I wrote my masters thesis using MS word and always wondered there must be better tool out there. Then a friend of mine told me about LaTeX, I tried but gave up. After a year or two I took up a job to create pdf document of 6 volumes of Ramayanam, which I could read on iPad. I saw the formatting of Gita press gorakhpur and thought to use that template. Then posted the questions about the template on this forum and finally I managed to create a 6000 page pdf document with best formatting I have ever done in my life. Hats off to the forum and creator of LaTeX / XeLaTeX.

Now I write my notes and documents in XeLaTeX only. I am working on Laghu Siddhanta Kaumudi. The flexibility it offers, I can not explain in words.

Answer 2

It is 1982 and I had just been made product manager for our PDP 11 (RSX11M) based SCADA system. I had acquired a spare PDP 11 for a development machine and persuaded the powers that be to let me purchase Unix so we could use it for a central configuration management environment. I also had a budget for a line printer for listings, but I instead purchased the (then) brand new HP Laserjet instead. My chief technical guy used nroff to produce a series of macros to enable us to write documents to a house style on this laserjet. All of a sudden, we had version controlled documents that were by far the most consistent and good looking in the company. The only disadvantage was that we couldn't add diagrams. This system kept us going until we were more or less forced by the take up of Microsoft Word around us (and particularly its ability to include pictures and diagrams) about 5 years later. But I became a fan of WYSIWYM and have been hankering after something like that for a long time. I even blogged about it some ideas 2004 http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk/2004/11/wysiwyg-v-wysiwym/

Fast forward to today, and I am semi retired, but still writing software and attempting to establish a house style and not enjoying trying to do it in Libre Office. I am also frustrated how these open formats do not play well with my git version control system. Having just found latex and its capabilities I can see that it has all the benefits our original system had plus the advantage of graphics. As a test I wrote a quite complicated entity relationship diagram using the tikz package and once I had worked out how to do it, surprisingly easy to get a very high quality result.

Answer 3

I'm just getting started, and haven't actually used LaTeX for a real project yet...

I've had a few projects lately related to programmatically-generated documents, and I'm not satisfied with the results. LaTeX was on my radar, but I didn't had time to investigate until last week.

Some process complex lab data and produce a report that describes the results. Early versions were plain *.txt files; other than using a bit of white space they were difficult to read at times. Lately I've been using HTML output which allows for more complex formatting and is still accessible; but the output is inconsistent between browsers, and prints terribly!

I have also let the creation of some documents which were quote large and repetitive (over 2400 pages on 11x17!). Typically these documents are created by hand in Word, but that clearly wasn't an option due to the scale needed for these. We were able to generate MS Word files in sections, which were manually stitched together, and tweaked to keep it from breaking.

I have wanted to include diagrams, but haven't found a practical method of generating them.

At this point, LaTeX looks to be a great fit, as I can generate plain-text files easily enough (even broken across multiple files), then render them to print-perfect PDF files that anyone can view. With Tikz (or the like), I can even include those diagrams!

Answer 4

I wanted to create a beautiful résumé. So, I downloaded moderncv and edited it to my heart's content.